- Propose 1-3 questions, based on the practicalities, goals, rationales, and/or challenges of global digital humanities and/or Dr. Gil’s own pathway and interventions on this score, in response to the course prep materials for this week. Links below.
- Share those questions by adding them in the comments section to this blog post.
- The questions should be ones that would be useful for us to discuss with Dr. Alex Gil, this week’s Intro to Digital Humanities visiting expert at 1:30 p.m. Thursday 3.26
- We ask that you post them here by 10:00 p.m. on Wednesday evening 3.25
Links: Course Prep for 3.24 & 3.26 (links on d2l as well):
- Faye Ginsburg, “Rethinking the Digital Age“
- Kate Theimer, “Participatory Archives: Something Old, Something New“
- “Global Perspectives: Interview with Alex Gil” in 4Humanities
- Alex Gil, The (Digital) Library of Babel / 6.7.2014
- Global Outlook::Digital Humanities
- Alex Gil, ed., “Around DH in 80 Days”
1. You frequently comment on the need for citizen scholarship and the remediation for the past. In your own experience, have you felt much resistance from formalized, western academic institutions to this fresh (in my opinion) approach? I agree that this remediation is necessary, but I don’t imagine it’s necessarily well-received by academia (at least in the US).
2. When demonstrating the variation of global digital humanities methodologies, and given the difficult-to-define nature and scope of digital humanities, were there problems during intellectual (not verbal) translation? Or simply put, did methodological expertise transcend cultural difference?
3. The projects are posted from amongst the world, but all of the projects are curated by an individual entity. And, it could be argued, that the how and which projects are presented can imply a specific (even if currently unknown) rhetoric and bias. What is your response to this?
Public participation in archival work seems intuitively well-meaning to me, and the readings seem to take a complimentary tone toward the enterprise in general as they discuss the breadth of programs that are being conducted in this vein, but what about the other side? Is there any sort of public backlash to certain digital archival work being done? If so, what forms has it taken and what have archivists done to attempt to alleviate the concerns?
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117428/limits-digital-humanities-adam-kirsch
This article claims that all humanists should be questioning the “tech tsunami” and resisting it.
“Is it actually true that reading online is an adequate substitute for reading on paper? If not, perhaps we should not be concentrating on digitizing our books but on preserving and circulating them more effectively. Are images able to do the work of a complex discourse? If not, and reasoning is irreducibly linguistic, then it would be a grave mistake to move writing away from the center of a humanities education.”
My question is: does the presenter think that these issues have been addressed adequately?
I’m currently working on a project that involves computational analysis of a corpus for the purposes of establishing thematic connection, remixing and/or reinterpretation of the source corpus, and archiving of the source corpus with the intent of the project being a finished collection of work that breaks the linearity of reading/writing up so that the experience can be more interactive and “browse” like. I want for those who are interested to also be able to search within the archive to find connections that perhaps those working on the project didn’t/couldn’t.
I wonder what this process could/should look like. Should I/we involve crowd-talent or crowd-interest in the search for source material, the archiving of that materiel, or the remixing? My worry is that the end product might feel too social or broad. I want there to be a broad quality to the experience, however I also feel that the project needs to have some coherent, centralized power for it to be “serious”. In class I will attempt to expound on these questions/concepts, but for now this is all I will share.
1. Social media is the most popular form of participatory archive; how does one improve participation in digital libraries or archives that are public but not social?
Decentralised curation broadens the spectrum of knowledge produced but we need users who will co-curate or co-archive this knowledge. How to encourage users to participate in projects like GO::DH or Around DH in 80 Days?